Actually, few educated people thought the Earth was flat. Aristotle and Ptolemy knew that it was round, as did many others, and their influence kept the truth alive. Dante, in the 14th century, portrays the Earth as round, but supposes that the Mount of Purgatory is at the antipode (the opposite end from Europe). Columbus did not prove that the Earth was round, per se, except to the ignorant. He proved that it was navigable, and that there was a normal land mass across the ocean.
Now, it is true that most people thought the Earth was the center of the universe, although there had been heliocentric theories in antiquity. The reason is the dominance of Aristotelianism. To Aristotle, the universe was an orderly system. God (the Prime Mover) was outside of the material universe, and desire for Him caused the sphere of the fixed stars, the most perfect portion of the material universe, to move. The desire, or love, each descending sphere had for the sphere above it continued the motion of the heavens. As one got closer to the center, the degree of materiality and indeterminateness increased, until, in the sublunar sphere, basically Earth, nature was fraught with accident. The seductiveness of this caused Ptolemy to reject out of hand heliocentricism, and to concoct an elaborate system to explain apparent anomalies in celestial phenomena without having to resort to heliocentrism. The dual authority of Aristotle and Ptolemy kept geocentrism dominant until the invention of the telescope allowed refined observations and made Ptolemy's system insupportable.......... |
